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Marius Stark serving the last days of his military service in Germany on September 11th, 2001. Because of a protocol in the German military, a fellow soldier asked Marius “are you interested in politics?” before taking him to a television to see the news. Later he visited the Düsseldorf train station, where he says he’d never seen so many people silently watching a giant television screen that weren’t watching football.

Rami Rihawi, a Syrian currently living in Berlin, describes how he and his friends at Aleppo University would flirt with girls at the architecture building–the center of the dating scene–despite the civil war that has ravaged much of the country. If successful, they would go on dates in the Mogambo neighborhood of Aleppo.

Entrepreneur Cristiano Volpi reflects on the changes of 1990s Italy from the perspective of his home town, Livorno, an historical stronghold of Italian communism, and how Italian politics changed after the rise of Silvio Berlusconi.

This post is part of a collaboration with author Davide Rubini to collect the stories of Italy in the aftermath of the “Bribesville” (Tangentopoli) scandals of the 1990s. Find out more about Rubini’s new novel, il fischio finale (The Final Blow).